Fortress Armor-METEOR Striker
Overview Following the closing events of the Serpent war and the use of the Oblivion device, the Grand Duchy high command wanted their own Niven based super weapon. Instead of following the Mass Alliance's rout of just using it as a massive bomb they instead wanted a weapon that was more tactical and less omnidirectional obliteration, some suggest this was a jab at the Mass Alliance for using such an uncontrollable destructive weapon. Teams from the Citadel Armor project were moved in order to look into what a design using such a potent energy supply could do, their answer was the Fortress armor under the name of project: METEOR Striker. The project never got past the pre-prototype stage due to various factors but was designed into a functional computer model. The Federation of Caithium attempted to ban Niven based weapons was said to be the major contributing factor in the cancellation of the project. Cost The METEOR Striker is said to be the single most expensive project ever seriously considered. With a price tag for the armor its self being the same as two Nightmare class dreadnought. The first factor contributing to its expense being the double S Titanium Tungsten armor which per centimeter cubed cost sixteen times as much as S grade Titanium Tungsten armor. The SS armor was said to be strong enough to deflect 80mm B2-C cannon rounds with little effort. This was expected to be the benefit of the armor at such a significant cost. The next factor was installing a plasma shield that was purchased from the Mass Alliance. The shield generator had to be down sized significantly in order to fit inside the Fortress armor. The R&D cost of reverse engineering it in order to fit it inside was expected to be around 7,150,120,000,000 Duchies (the currency of the Grand Duchy), this is the only research actually accomplished before the shutting down of the project. After that was the up sized BSLG systems, the BSLG-100,000 hyper cannon being chief among these expenses with an expected price tag of 10,000,000,000,000 Duchies. The major factor included with this massive price tag was its Niven reactor. The research estimates alone for the R&D to make it functional was expected to exceed 7,800,000,000,000,000 Duchies. More then the highest ever yearly military budget of the Grand Duchy in recorded history. The expected final price tag of one METEOR striker including R&D was 10,258,222,922,597,647 Duchies. 3.5 Quadrillion less then the entire GDP of the Grand Duchy. Attempted banning After the end of the Serpent war and the deployment of the Oblivion device by Rwolin Harper the Federation of Caithium attempted to ban the use of all Niven based weapons including Niven powered weapons. The meeting of nations was unable to reach a deciding vote on the subject with 3 votes in favor (Federation of Caithium, Republic of Judecen, Mitura), 3 votes against (Grand Duchy, Kingdom of Nodith, United Cantium Conglomerate) and 2 abstaining (Mass Alliance (forced to abstain via circumstances) and Ofilian). The Grand Duchy feared that an eventual deal would be made that would turn the vote against them and canceled the METEOR Striker project on the spot according to a few sources. Power supply The METEOR Striker uses a Niven Reactor which was expected to run on 0.19 ml of Niven and have an output of over 600 Gigawatts (GW) per hour. Due to the limited nature of Niven supplies testing could not be conducted and many of the predicted outputs of the Reactor were total speculation. Some sources claim it would likely have been closer to 300 GW/h and that the original figure was used as propaganda. No research into the actual construction of the Niven reactor was done as part of Project METEOR Striker. Cancellation Between the absurdly high cost and resource intensity of the project, combine with the likely banning of Niven based weapons it's not hard to see the Grand Duchy's fear that such a huge price tag would sink them into a massive debt for an absolutely useless weapon once another nation voted to ban Niven weapons. Likely encouraged by the Grand Duchy going forward with building their own Niven weapon. Designers on the project say that there would be no fusion or anti-matter reactor powerful enough that could fit inside the suit and have it work as intended. Weapons BSLG-100,000 hyper cannon The largest most costly gun on the whole of the armor, expected to output between 8,000 kW's to 3,000 MW's of power depending on the source or version of the project looked at, it is easily the most powerful none kinetic weapon ever built by an Aetherian species. It was also expected that these would replace the 600mm CC-S01 cannons on the Nightmare dreadnoughts in their post war refits. BSLG-1400 long range tactical rifle The second largest weapon on the METEOR Striker the BSLG-1400 LRTR was a massive laser rifle capable of devastating Frigates and destroyers that were not able to equip plasma shielding. It was expected that with the range and speed of the METEOR Striker was expected to shred apart smaller ships with this gun. BSLG-7000-B (superior) The BSLG-7000-B was an up-scaled version of of the BSLG-7000 used by the Nodachi during the Serpent war, but instead of using micro fusion cores it drew power directly from the reactor making it much more effective. BSLG-9000 Sniper rifle The BSLG-9000 Sniper rifle is the exact same one found on the Bunker-S armor, just removed and added to a turret on the back of the METEOR Striker. BSLG-1300 laser cannons An upgraded version of the BSLG-7000 rifles with a much longer barrel length, these were used to mop up smaller ships or fighters after using its main gun to eradicate the larger targets. Ballistic missile launch platforms The last weapon of the METEOR Striker is its massive missile launchers. Carrying 10 ballistic missiles that carry 30 to 60 Claw hammer or Jack hammer missiles, sources very. Piloting The METEOR Striker needs two pilots in order to properly use the neural link, otherwise the size and complexity requires to minds to almost fully immerse themselves in the link. There is an incredibly high chance of mental damage with prolonged use. Many in the project wanted to donate more time to making this system safe but the cancellation of the project ended any ambition of that.